Death Boogie

Watching Death Boogie feels something akin to a drugs trip - flashing images appear to slip from 3D to 2D, synthesised sounds saturate the auditorium and are capped by unceasing rhythmic, rhyming poetry-cum-rap. Death Boogie is difficult to categorise – existing as it does at the nexus of performance poetry, graphic book and concept album.  Whatever it is precisely, there can be no doubt that it represents a considerable choreographic and creative feat.

Death Boogie is, for the most part, the work of the elastic-voiced poet-actor Darian Dauchan and his two-man band of musicians, violinist Curtis Stewart and bassist Ian J. Burnett. During Death Boogie, Dauchan performs a series of hip-hop poems. These form the story (just about possible to follow, if you concentrate very hard) of one young American’s journey from political inertia to activism. Alongside the poetry Dauchan uses synth-boxes to create dizzying live vocal loops and interacts with a continuously shifting backdrop of projected black and white graphic novel-style images (the work of artist David Allyon). Drawings of depressed spaces on beds are filled by his live body and cartoon-like wheeling-arm punches are accompanied by ‘Kapows.’

Death Boogie is clearly intended as a piece of campaigning theatre yet its poetry is less memorable than its pyrotechnics, and while it succeeds in impressing, it never quite compels. A work of cacophonous sound and visual fury, Death Boogie is certainly trying to signify something – it is just not always clear what.